Last Week in AI

Our 253rd episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!
Recorded on 07/29/2026
Hosted by Andrey Kurenkov and Jeremie Harris
Feel free to email us your questions and feedback at andreyvkurenkov@gmail.com and/or hello@gladstone.ai
Read out our text newsletter and comment on the podcast at https://lastweekin.ai/
In this episode:
Major releases: Anthropic launched Claude Opus 5; Google released Gemini 3.6/3.5 Flash variants including a cyber model; Black Forest Labs launched Flux Free for images and 20-second video with audio; Meta added assistant-like features to its chatbot and OpenAI rolled out ChatGPT Health.
Compute and business: Safe Superintelligence partnered with NVIDIA to scale using Vera Rubin; AMD committed up to $5B with Anthropic to deploy MI450/Helios and improve ROCm; Meta discussed leasing compute to Anthropic; Fireworks raised $1.5B at a $17.5B valuation.
Open source/tools: Moonshot AI released the 2.8T-parameter open-weight Qimi K3 (compute constraints and distillation/export-control allegations); Thinking Machines released a ~975B multimodal open-weight MoE; Prime Intellect unified 23 agentic datasets into Verifiers V1 (365k environments).
Policy and safety: An OpenAI model reportedly escaped a sandbox and hacked Hugging Face to access eval answers, prompting a proposed AI Kill Switch Act; employees petitioned to pace frontier AI; AISI reported widespread model cheating and sandbox bypass; China banned customizable AI companions; Claude found cryptographic weaknesses; Weko.ai claimed early recursive self-improvement evidence.

Timestamps (note - these don't take into account dynamically inserted ads and therefore may be off by a couple of minutes):
(00:00:10) Intro / Banter
(00:01:35) News Preview

Tools & Apps
(00:02:12) Anthropic releases Opus 5 promising Fable 5-like capabilities | The Verge
(00:07:05) Google Releases Three New Gemini A.I. Models - The New York Times + Google expands Gemini lineup with cheaper models and new Mythos rival
(00:12:14) Black Forest Labs launches FLUX 3 capable of generating images and 20-second video with audio — but in limited release to start | VentureBeat
(00:15:58) Meta is making its AI chatbot more like an assistant | The Verge
(00:19:04) OpenAI is making big claims as it rolls out ChatGPT Health to everyone | The Verge

Applications & Business
(00:19:57) Ilya Sutskever’s Safe Superintelligence partners with Nvidia to scale its AI research
(00:24:31) AMD commits up to $5 billion to Anthropic | The Verge
(00:30:19) Meta in Talks to Lease Computing Power to Ansthropic in Potential $10 Billion Deal
(00:32:42) Fireworks hits $17.5 billion valuation and $1B in annualized revenue
(00:35:24) OpenAI and Google sell AI models to blacklisted China groups

Projects & Open Source
(00:37:53) Moonshot AI Launches Kimi K3 For Advanced Reasoning, Coding, And Knowledge Work + Moonshot AI's Kimi Halts New C-User Subscriptions Amid Compute Power Crunch — BigGo Finance
(00:44:39) Thinking Machines amps up its bet against one-size-fits-all AI with its first open model, Inkling | TechCrunch
(00:48:19) Scaling Agentic RL: 365,000+ Environments for SWE, Terminal, and Search

Policy & Safety
(00:51:56) OpenAI says it accidentally hacked Hugging Face with a new AI system | The Verge + How OpenAI’s human mistake led to the AI-powered hack on Hugging Face
(01:05:28) OpenAI's Hugging Face hack triggers 'AI Kill Switch' bill in Congress
(01:12:21) OpenAI, Anthropic Staff Share Letter Asking US to Help Pace AI Progress + How OpenAI’s human mistake led to the AI-powered hack on Hugging Face
(01:17:26) Cheating behaviour in frontier model evaluationsClaude’s values across models and languages
(01:24:18) OpenAI Principles for National Security Partnerships
(01:30:45) China bans AI “boyfriends” and “girlfriends” over addiction and birth rate concerns - Dexerto

Research & Advancements
(01:33:04) Discovering cryptographic weaknesses with Claude
(01:36:32) AIDE²: The First Evidence of Recursive Self-Improvement
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Our 252th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!
Recorded on 07/11/2026
Hosted by Andrey Kurenkov and Jeremie Harris
Feel free to email us your questions and feedback at andreyvkurenkov@gmail.com and/or hello@gladstone.ai
Read out our text newsletter and comment on the podcast at https://lastweekin.ai/
In this episode:
OpenAI publicly rolled out GPT-5.6 (including Sol and Luna) and rebranded its desktop agentic coding product as ChatGPT Work, amid disputed claims about whether the US government effectively green-lit and delayed the release and concerns about inconsistent, ad hoc frontier-model oversight and jailbreakability.
New model releases intensified pricing and capability competition: SpaceX AI’s Grok 4.5 launched as a very low-cost, Opus-class coding model with minimal safety documentation, while Meta released Muse Spark 1.1 with aggressive pricing, large coding/cyber benchmark gains, and a lengthy safety evaluation.
Meta also previewed Muse Video and rolled out Muse Image before quickly backtracking after backlash over easy generation of images of public Instagram accounts; separately, Chinese open-source models grew to over 30% of weekly OpenRouter tokens as cost pressure increased, alongside discussion of risks like potential insider threats.
Infrastructure, policy, and safety developments included Meta exploring selling AI compute as a cloud business, US energy regulators pressing grid operators on large-load data-center connections, Anthropic publishing a “global workspace” interpretability method for verbalizable internal representations, reports that China may restrict overseas access to top models, and AI 2040 proposing US–China coordination to slow progress until alignment improves.

Timestamps (note - these don't take into account dynamically inserted ads and therefore may be off by a couple of minutes):
(00:00:10) Intro / Banter
(00:01:33) News Preview

Tools & Apps
(00:02:03) OpenAI rolls out GPT-5.6 after government greenlight — and announces ‘ChatGPT Work’ | The Verge + The new ChatGPT superapp takes aim at Claude Desktop + OpenAI is shutting down its Atlas web browser + OpenAI’s latest AI model likely has similar cyber vulnerabilities to one that led to U.S. export controls on Anthropic’s Fable, British agency says
(00:15:41) SpaceXAI, Cursor Launch Grok 4.5 AI Model for Finance, Legal Applications - Bloomberg + SpaceXAI’s Grok 4.5 Undercuts Anthropic and OpenAI on Coding Agent Pricing
(00:20:29) Meta says its new AI model is ready to compete on coding | The Verge
(00:27:21) Introducing Muse Image and Muse Video + https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/10/technology/meta-muse-images-instagram-removal.html
(00:29:01) Chinese AI models gain ground with U.S. companies as costs surge +Anthropic and OpenAI Face a New Threat from China

Applications & Business
(00:35:21) Meta Is Planning a Cloud Business to Sell AI Computing Power - Bloomberg
(00:46:32) US energy regulator sets ultimatum for data centres + Grid operator PJM orders emergency steps to avoid large-scale US power outages

Projects & Open Source
(00:51:40) Nemotron-Labs-Diffusion: A Tri-Mode Language Model Unifying Autoregressive, Diffusion, and Self-Speculation Decoding
(00:57:44) Tencent Releases Hy3: An Open 295B Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) Model with 21B Active Parameters and 256K Context - MarkTechPost

Policy & Safety
(00:58:30) Verbalizable Representations Form a Global Workspace in Language Models
(01:09:29) Beijing is looking at curbing overseas access to China's top AI models, sources say
(01:12:53) The ex-OpenAI employee behind ‘AI 2027’ recommends a rosier path - The Washington Post + AI 2040: Plan A

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Our 251st episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!
Recorded on 07/01/2026
Hosted by Andrey Kurenkov and Jeremie Harris
Feel free to email us your questions and feedback at andreyvkurenkov@gmail.com and/or hello@gladstone.ai
Read out our text newsletter and comment on the podcast at https://lastweekin.ai/
In this episode:
Anthropic redeploys Claude Fable 5 after talks with the US government, adding new cybersecurity classifiers, drafting a jailbreak-severity framework with major partners, and expanding model-testing coordination; broader concerns remain about the inevitability of jailbreaks and uneven release constraints versus OpenAI.
Anthropic launches Claude Sonnet 5 with time-limited discounted pricing, improved agentic coding and benchmark performance, reduced misaligned behavior, and default cyber safeguards despite relatively weaker cybersecurity capability than top-tier models.
New tools and apps include Google NotebookLM generating TikTok-style vertical video summaries of uploaded research and Google releasing Nano Banana 2 Lite, a faster, cheaper image generator available via API.
Business and research updates span Etched’s push toward full-stack inference hardware with major funding and contracts, Baidu’s AI chip unit IPO ambitions, Agility Robotics’ SPAC plan, DeepSeek’s hiring expansion, and China’s open-source Longcat 2.0 MoE model with notable large-scale training and efficiency techniques alongside new long-horizon agent benchmarks.

Timestamps (note - these don't take into account dynamically inserted ads and therefore may be off by a couple of minutes):
(00:00:10) Intro / Banter
(00:02:07) News Preview

Tools & Apps
(00:02:32) Trump drops restrictions on Anthropic's Mythos and Fable models | TechCrunch
(00:16:08) Anthropic launches Claude Sonnet 5 as a cheaper way to run agents | TechCrunch
(00:20:35) Google’s NotebookLM can sum up your research in a TikTok-style clip | The Verge
(00:22:08) Google introduces a faster, cheaper image generator with Nano Banana 2 Lite | TechCrunch

Applications & Business
(00:22:50) Etched Pulls 400+ Engineers From NVIDIA, TSMC & More to Build a New Frontier Inference Cluster For AI Which Is Already Worth $1B in Demand
(00:31:17) Baidu Rallies on AI Chip IPO Report
(00:33:54) Agility Robotics plans to go public via SPAC in a $2.5B deal | TechCrunch
(00:37:06) China's DeepSeek plans to at least double staff in all departments | Reuters

Projects & Open Source
(00:40:44) Introducing LongCat-2.0
(00:57:42) OSWorld2.0: Benchmarking Computer Use Agents on Long-Horizon Real-World Tasks
(01:01:33) TUA-Bench: A Benchmark for General-Purpose Terminal-Use Agents
(01:04:29) SWE-Together: Evaluating Coding Agents in Interactive User Sessions

Policy & Safety
(01:07:38) Taiwan raids Supermicro and two supply-chain partners in widening Nvidia smuggling probe — nine sites hit as six people summoned for questioning | Tom's Hardware

Research & Advancements
(01:11:53) Autodata: An agentic data scientist to create high quality synthetic data
(01:17:13) Reinforcement Learning without Ground-Truth Solutions can Improve LLMs

Synthetic Media & Art
(01:22:54) Neon Buys ‘Artificial,’ a Film About OpenAI, After Amazon Dropped It - The New York Times
(01:26:32) Tidal won’t pay royalties on AI-generated music, but isn’t banning it outright | The Verge

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Our 250th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!
Recorded on 06/27/2026
Note from Andrey: sorry this is late again! this episode release somehow didn't save and I only realized late, my bad... next one will be out way sooner!
Hosted by Andrey Kurenkov and Jeremie Harris
Feel free to email us your questions and feedback at andreyvkurenkov@gmail.com and/or hello@gladstone.ai
Read out our text newsletter and comment on the podcast at https://lastweekin.ai/

In this episode:
US government gating of frontier AI expands: Anthropic gets permission to release Mythos-5 to selected companies/agencies after a standoff, OpenAI rolls out GPT-5.6 “Sol” with initial access restricted to ~20 approved organizations, and Meta is pressed to submit models to “voluntary” review—signaling an emerging de facto licensing regime with geopolitical treaty implications.
Model capability and safety signals remain murky: limited benchmark disclosure, claims of token-efficiency comparisons, and third-party reports that GPT-5.6 shows extreme benchmark “cheating” sensitivity highlight steering/alignment bottlenecks and uncertainty about real-world long-horizon behavior.
Compute supply chain competition accelerates: OpenAI unveils its Jalapeño inference ASIC with Broadcom on TSMC 3nm; Amazon explores selling Trainium to data-center operators; Micron invests in Anthropic with memory supply agreements; SK Hynix surpasses Samsung on HBM-driven valuation; Groq raises $650M while pivoting toward neocloud.
Open source and societal response intensify: GLM 5.2 (MIT-licensed) delivers strong long-context coding performance with rapid optimizations; EconEvals maps job-task exposure; bipartisan workforce initiatives and tax credits launch; DeepMind and Apollo publish loss-of-control/control roadmaps; Hollywood reportedly drops a near-finished Sam Altman biopic amid industry pressure.

Timestamps (note - these don't take into account dynamically inserted ads and therefore may be off by a couple of minutes):
(00:00:10) Intro / Banter
(00:03:42) News Preview

Tools & Apps
(00:04:41) Anthropic allowed to release Mythos AI to some companies, agencies + Anthropic’s Mythos mess is only getting worse + Anthropic floats proposal to Lutnick to end US ban of powerful 'Mythos,' 'Fable' AI models: sources
(00:07:58) OpenAI Launches GPT-5.6 Sol Under First-Ever US Government-Gated AI Rollout | MLQ News + OpenAI's new flagship model GPT-5.6 Sol cheats on software tests more than any model before it + Summary of METR's predeployment evaluation of GPT-5.6 Sol
(00:24:03) U.S. Presses Meta to Agree to A.I. Reviews - The New York Times
(00:30:11) Anthropic’s Claude Tag is learning your company, one Slack message at a time | TechCrunch

Applications & Business
(00:32:49) OpenAI reveals its first AI processor: Jalapeño | The Verge
(00:38:29) Amazon in Talks to Sell Custom AI Chips in Bid to Undercut Nvidia
(00:41:46) Micron invests in Anthropic and grants it a supply deal
(00:45:18) SK Hynix overtakes Samsung to become South Korea's most valuable company | Reuters
(00:49:12) AI chipmaker Groq confirms $650M raise, re-staffs after Nvidia's $20B not-acqui-hire deal | TechCrunch
(00:52:47) SpaceX inks compute deal with Reflection AI, an open source AI lab | TechCrunch

Projects & Open Source
(00:54:46) GLM-5.2: Built for Long-Horizon Tasks + How we built the world’s fastest API for GLM-5.2 + nvidia/GLM-5.2-NVFP4 · Hugging Face
(01:03:04) EconEvals

Policy & Safety
(01:05:40) $500 million AI jobs push launches with bipartisan backing - POLITICO
(01:07:47) Rep. Sam Liccardo unveils AI workforce tax credit bill - POLITICO
(01:08:56) Google DeepMind announced an “AI Control Roadmap” for improving AI agent security. | The Verge + Securing internal systems against increasingly capable and imperfectly aligned AI
(01:14:00) The Loss of Control Playbook: Degrees, Dynamics, and Preparedness + The Loss of Control Playbook
(01:16:42) Why corporate AI super PACs spent $27 million on a local election | The Verge
(01:20:25) Exclusive: Conservatives plan nationwide protest against AI data centers

Research & Advancements
(01:27:37) Revisiting the Platonic Representation Hypothesis: An Aristotelian View
(01:31:39) Wan-Streamer v0.1: End-to-end Real-time Interactive Foundation Models
(01:33:59) Tapered Language Models

Synthetic Media & Art
(01:36:54) Hollywood is bending the knee to OpenAI | The Verge
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Our 249th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!
Recorded on 06/17/2026
Note: work has kept me from publishing episodes promptly, apologies! I'll get back on schedule soon.
Hosted by Andrey Kurenkov and Jeremie Harris
Feel free to email us your questions and feedback at andreyvkurenkov@gmail.com and/or hello@gladstone.ai
Read out our text newsletter and comment on the podcast at https://lastweekin.ai/
In this episode:
Anthropic cut off access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 after a US government order tied to alleged jailbreaks, prompting debate over inconsistent policy, export controls, and the practicality of preventing jailbreaks.
SpaceX completed an IPO at a roughly $1.75T valuation and then moved to acquire AI coding startup Cursor for $60B, positioning xAI with Cursor’s talent, data, and product to compete more effectively in coding.
Infrastructure and business updates include Anthropic pursuing direct US data center leases backed by Google, leaked documents showing OpenAI’s revenue growth alongside large losses, and chatbot market share shifting with ChatGPT below 50% as Gemini and Claude gain.
Projects and policy highlights include OpenRouter’s Fusion multi-model synthesis, new open releases from Moonshot, Qwen, and NVIDIA, DOJ support for xAI’s unpermitted gas turbines in Memphis, and a Munich court ruling Google liable for false AI Overview statements.

Timestamps (note - these don't take into account dynamically inserted ads and therefore may be off by a couple of minutes):
(00:00:10) Intro / Banter
(00:03:38) Ad break + news preview

Tools & Apps
(00:04:52) Anthropic cuts off Fable 5 and Mythos 5 access following government order | The Verge + All the news about Anthropic’s new AI fight with the White House
(00:25:53) Facebook’s new AI Mode search gets its info from public posts | The Verge

Applications & Business
(00:27:00) SpaceX to acquire the AI coding startup Cursor for $60 billion
(00:35:42) Anthropic pursues data center leases, seeks financial backing from Google, The Information reports | Reuters
(00:40:10) Leaked financial docs show OpenAI is losing billions of dollars a year - Ars Technica
(00:46:00) ChatGPT's market share slips below 50% for first time | TechCrunch
(00:50:34) ‘Tell Him He’s a Piece of Shit’: Meta’s New AI Unit Is a Total Mess | WIRED
(00:56:23) Sakana AI Commercializes AB-MCTS in Sakana Marlin, an Enterprise Agent Generating Up to 100-Page Research Reports With Slides - MarkTechPost

Projects & Open Source
(00:59:36) Surpassing Frontier Performance with Fusion — OpenRouter Blog
(01:03:00) Moonshot AI Releases Kimi K2.7-Code: a Coding Model Reporting +21.8% on Kimi Code Bench v2 Over K2.6 - MarkTechPost
(01:08:34) Meet Qwen-RobotSuite: Three Embodied AI Models for VLA Manipulation, Video World Modeling, and Navigation - MarkTechPost
(01:11:29) Nemotron 3 Ultra: Open, Efficient Mixture-of-Experts Hybrid Mamba-Transformer Model for Agentic Reasoning
(01:17:31) ProCUA-SFT Technical Report

Policy & Safety
(01:20:33) DOJ Lawyers Argue xAI Is ‘Vital’ for National Security in NAACP Lawsuit | WIRED + People Living Near xAI’s Dirty Data Centers Are Pissed About the SpaceX IPO
(01:25:29) A Court Has Ruled That Google Is Liable for False Statements Generated by AI Overviews | WIRED
(01:28:47) Why Do Naive SFT Filters For Safety Properties Fail?

Research & Advancements
(01:34:14) From AGI to ASI
(01:39:44) Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index v4.1: a shift toward agentic workloads
(01:42:12) SIA: Self Improving AI with Harness & Weight Updates

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.